IncognitoErgoSumJul 13, 2023

The AI genie is here. What we're deciding now is whether we all have access to it, or whether it's a privilege afforded only to rich people, corporations, and governments.

I know a lot of people want to interpret copyright law so that allowing a machine to learn concepts from a copyrighted work is copyright infringement, but I think what people will need to consider is that all that's going to do is keep AI out of the hands of regular people and place it specifically in the hands of people and... #ai #copyright #tech

https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/186867

The AI genie is here. What we're deciding now is whether we all have access to it, or whether it's a privilege afforded only to rich people, corporations, and governments. - Technology - kbin.social

I know a lot of people want to interpret copyright law so that allowing a machine to learn concepts from a copyrighted work is copyright infringement, but I think what people will need to consider is that all that's going to do is keep AI out of the hands of regular people and place it specifically in the hands of people and...

Show threadRagnellJul 13, 2023

Seriously, the average person has two FAR more immediate problems than not being able to create their own AI:

  • Losing their livelihood to an AI.

  • Losing their life because an AI has been improperly placed in a decision making position because it was sold as having more capabilities than it actually has.

    • 1 could be solved by severe and permanent economic reforms, but those reforms are very far away. 2 is also going to need legal restrictions on what jobs an AI can do, and restrictions on the claims that an AI company can make when marketing their product. Possibly a whole freaking government agency designated for certifying AI.

    Right now, it's in our best interest that AI production is slowed down and/or prevented from being deployed to certain areas until we've had a chance for the law to catch up. Copyright restrictions and privacy laws are going to be the most effective way to do this, because it will force the companies to go back and retrain on public domain and prevent them from using AI to wholesale replace certain jobs.

    As for the average person who has the computer hardware and time to train an AI (bear in mind Google Bard and Open AI use human contractors to correct misinformation in the answers as well as scanning), there is a ton of public domain writing out there.

    The endgame, though, is to stop scenario 1 and scenario 2, and the best way to do that is any way that forces the people who are making AI to sit down and think about where they can use the AI. Because the problem is not the speed of AI development, but the speed of corporate greed. And the problem is not that the average person LACKS access to AI, but that the rich have TOO much access to AI and TOO many horrible plans about how to use it before all the bugs have been worked out.

    Furthermore, if they're using people's creativity to make a product, it's just WRONG not to have permission or to not credit them.

    Show threadIncognitoErgoSum

    Losing their life because an AI has been improperly placed in a decision making position because it was sold as having more capabilities than it actually has.

    I would tend to agree with you on this one, although we don't need bad copyright legislation to deal with it, since laws can deal with it more directly. I would personally put in place an organization that requires rigorous proof that AI in those roles is significantly safer than a human, like the FDA does for medication.

    As for the average person who has the computer hardware and time to train an AI (bear in mind Google Bard and Open AI use human contractors to correct misinformation in the answers as well as scanning), there is a ton of public domain writing out there.

    Corporations would love if regular people were only allowed to train their AIs on things that are 75 years out of date. Creative interpretations of copyright law aren't going to stop billion- and trillion-dollar companies from licensing things to train AI on, either by paying a tiny percentage of their war chests or just ignoring the law altogether the way Meta always does, and getting a customary slap on the wrist. What will end up happening is that Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Elon Musk and his companies, government organizations, etc. will all have access to AIs that know current, useful, and relevant things, and the rest of us will not, or we'll have to pay monthly for the privilege of access to a limited version of that knowledge, further enriching those groups.

    Furthermore, if they're using people's creativity to make a product, it's just WRONG not to have permission or to not credit them.

    Let's talk about Stable Diffusion for a moment. Stable Diffusion models can be compressed down to about 2 gigabytes and still produce art. Stable Diffusion was trained on 5 billion images and finetuned on a subset of 600 million images, which means that the average image contributes 2B/600M, or a little bit over three bytes, to the final dataset. With the exception of a few mostly public domain images that appeared in the dataset hundreds of times, Stable Diffusion learned broad concepts from large numbers of images, similarly to how a human artist would learn art concepts. If people need permission to learn a teeny bit of information from each image (3 bytes of information isn't copyrightable, btw), then artists should have to get permission for every single image they put on their mood boards or use for inspiration, because they're taking orders of magnitude more than three bytes of information from each image they use for inspiration on a given work.

    Jul 13, 2023 at 2:32pmWeb
    Show threadRagnellJul 13, 2023

    Except an AI is not taking inspiration, it's compiling information to determine mathematical averages.

    A human can be inspired because they are a human being. A Large Language Model cannot. Stable Diffusion is not near the complexity of a human brain. Just because it does it faster doesn't mean it's doing it the same way. Human beings have free will and a host of human rights. A human being is paid for the work they do, an AI program's creator is paid for the work it did. And if that creator used copyrighted work, then he should be having to get permission to use it, because he's profitting off this AI program.

    I would tend to agree with you on this one, although we don't need bad copyright legislation to deal with it, since laws can deal with it more directly. I would personally put in place an organization that requires rigorous proof that AI in those roles is significantly safer than a human, like the FDA does for medication.

    I would too, but we need TIME to get that done and right now, lawsuits will buy us time. That was the point of my comment.

    Show threadIncognitoErgoSumJul 13, 2023

    Except an AI is not taking inspiration, it's compiling information to determine mathematical averages.

    The AIs we're talking about are neural networks. They don't do statistics, they don't have databases, and they don't take mathematical averages. They simulate neurons, and their ability to learn concepts is emergent from that, the same way the human brain is. Nothing about an artificial neuron ever takes an average of anything, reads any database, or does any statistical calculations. If an artificial neural network can be said to be doing those things, then so is the human brain.

    There is nothing magical about how human neurons work. Researchers are already growing small networks out of animal neurons and using them the same way that we use artificial neural networks.

    There are a lot of "how AI works" articles in there that put things in layman's terms (and use phrases like "statistical analysis" and "mathematical averages", and unfortunately people (including many very smart people) extrapolate from the incorrect information in those articles and end up making bad assumptions about how AI actually works.

    A human being is paid for the work they do, an AI program's creator is paid for the work it did. And if that creator used copyrighted work, then he should be having to get permission to use it, because he's profitting off this AI program.

    If an artist uses a copyrighted work on their mood board or as inspiration, then they should pay for that, because they're making a profit from that copyrighted work. Human beings should, as you said, be paid for the work they do. Right? If an artist goes to art school, they should pay all of the artists whose work they learned from, right? If a teacher teaches children in a class, that teacher should be paid a royalty each time those children make use of the knowledge they were taught, right? (I sense a sidetrack -- yes, teachers are horribly underpaid and we desperately need to fix that, so please don't misconstrue that previous sentence.)

    There's a reason we don't copyright facts, styles, and concepts.

    Oh, and if you want to talk about something that stores an actual database of scraped data, makes mathematical and statistical inferences, and reproduces things exactly, look no further than Google. It's already been determined in court that what Google does is fair use.

    Show threadRagnellJul 13, 2023

    @IncognitoErgoSum Gonna need a source on Large Language Models using neural networks based on the human brain here.

    EDIT: Scratch that. I'm just going to need you to explain how this is based on the human brain functions.

    Show threadIncognitoErgoSumJul 13, 2023

    I'm willing to, but if I take the time to do that, are you going to listen to my answer, or just dismiss everything I say and go back to thinking what you want to think?

    Also, a couple of preliminary questions to help me explain things:

    What's your level of familiarity with the source material? How much experience do you have writing or modifying code that deals with neural networks? My own familiarity lies mostly with PyTorch. Do you use that or something else? If you don't have any direct familiarity with programming with neural networks, do you have enough of a familiarity with them to at least know what some of those boxes mean, or do I need to explain them all?

    Most importantly, when I say that neural networks like GPT-* use artificial neurons, are you objecting to that statement?

    I need to know what it is I'm explaining.

    Show threadRagnellJul 13, 2023

    @IncognitoErgoSum I don't think you can. Because THIS? Is not a model of how humans learn language. It's a model of how a computer learns to write sentences.

    If what you're going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don't bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.

    But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this "neural" network is operating similarly to how the human brain does... then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.

    In either case, it's probably not worth your time.

    Show threadthrowsbooksJul 13, 2023

    But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this “neural” network is operating similarly to how the human brain does… then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.

    I think this is a neat point.

    The human brain is very complex. The neural networks trained on computers right now are more like collections of neurons grown together in a petri dish, rather than a full human brain. They serve one function, say, recognizing or generating an image or calculating some probability or deciding on what the next word should be in a sequence. While the brain is a huge internetwork of these smaller, more specialized neural networks.

    No, neural networks don’t have a database and they don’t do stats. They’re trained through trial and error, not aggregation. The way they work is explicitly based on a mathematical model of a biological neuron.

    And when an AI is developed that’s advanced enough to rival the actual human brain, then yeah, the AI rights question becomes a real thing. We’re not there yet, though. Still just matter in petri dishes. That’s a whole other controversial argument.

    Show threadIncognitoErgoSumJul 13, 2023

    I don't believe that current AIs should have rights. They aren't conscious.

    My point is was purely that AIs learn concepts and that concepts aren't copyrightable. Encoding concepts into neurons (that is, learning) doesn't require consciousness.

    Show threadRagnellJul 14, 2023

    @IncognitoErgoSum If they don't have consciousness, then they aren't comparable to a human being being inspired. It is that simple.

    The human who created the AI is profitting from the AI's work, but that human was not inspired by the works he used to train the AI. He fed them into a machine to help make that machine. It doesn't matter how close the machine is to human thought, it is a machine that is making something for other to profit from.

    The people who created the AI took work without permission, used it to build and refine a machine, and are now using that machine to profit. They are selling that machine to people who would otherwise hire the people who did the work that was taken without permission and used to build the machine. This is all sorts of fucked up, man.

    If an AI's creation is comparable to a direct human's creation, then it belongs to the AI. Whatever it is, it doesn't belong to the guys who built the AI OR the guys who BOUGHT the AI. Which is actually one of the demands from the WGA, that AI-generated scripts have NOBODY listed as the writer and NOBODY able to copyright that work.

    SAG-AFTRA just got a contract offer that says background performers would get their likeness scanned and have it belong to the studio FOREVER so that they can simply generate these performers through AI.

    This is what is happening RIGHT NOW. And you want to compare the output of an AI to a human's blood sweat and tears, and argue that copyright protections would HURT people rather than help them avoid exploitation.

    Because that is what the AI programmers are doing, they are EXPLOITING living authors, living artists, living performers to create a machine that will replace those very people.

    The copyright system, which yes is exploited and manipulated by these corporations, is still the only method we have to protect small-time creatives FROM those corporations. And right now, those corporations are poised to use AI to attack small-time creatives.

    So yes, your comparison to human inspiration is a damned fairy tale. Because it whitewashes the exploitation of human workers by equating them to the very machine that's being used to exploit them.